I've never worked in software for banking however I have worked in a large TelCo in the UK.<p>The bosses up the top were so abstracted away from what developers were working on, even the MDs of tech departments were in the dark.
This was due to a thick barrier of (project, delivery, platform) managers between devs and execs.<p>I can remember one time a director of "innovation" came in for a surprise visit. Most of the managers had went out for a team lunch. So I was left with my other socially awkward colleagues babysitting this exec, along with the head of testing.<p>After about 5 minutes of showing the exec what we were actually working on, his eyes lit up, as though we had just discovered fire. In the end he was really happy and amazed on what we were working on.<p>All he had ever seen were some mockups and a video demo.
We also got a chance to mention some of our grievances.<p>About two weeks later, our team had magically had some "extra" budget to buy Macs and 24inch monitors.
If nothing else, that saga gave us the perfect case study in what can go wrong with total cut-over migrations, rather than incremental releases, in complex systems
His first Treasury Committee appearance earlier in the year was very telling, in completely in denial about the extent of the problems, or issues/fears of their customers without even a hint of apology - I moved my banking elsewhere.
All of the 'big' UK banks are still on similar out dated technologies as TSB was, they were the first to try to move and it hasn't paid off. I hope the other major banks
a) do it better
b) don't use it as an excuse never to do it
Banks treat IT systems as of no value, they outsource overseas, they seriously think any developer brain is the same as any other.<p>Banks treat development as just like call centers... they know they have to pay for warm bodies, any warm body will do.
I was reading up on this in relation to Sabadell and found: <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c5157c1e-20ab-11e5-aa5a-398b2169cf79" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/c5157c1e-20ab-11e5-aa5a-398b2169c...</a> - in 2015 newspapers were warning that this was "particularly risky".
With a golden parachute and his pension fully intact? That is conspicuously absent from the article but it is usually the way. And no bar in being a director of another firm. The executive class are a law unto themselves.<p>What happens to the lowly engineers pressured into cutting corners to meet an arbitrary deadline and denied the resources they needed? No such lavish rewards for them.